


Indoors

by Luxicorde



Series: FFXIV Write 2020 [6]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Pre-Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, aka era has and always will be a bit of a lil shit, wholesome content time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:20:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26344774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luxicorde/pseuds/Luxicorde
Summary: Thancred is cautious, but he does his best.
Series: FFXIV Write 2020 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1906447
Kudos: 2





	Indoors

**Author's Note:**

> Era used to be a handful for everyone and only really mellowed out after learning how cruel the world actually is.

Erastus hadn’t moved from the window all morning. He was barely tall enough to see over the edge, standing on the tips of his toes (paws? Thancred wasn’t sure what to call them) and balancing himself with a grip on the sill. It was around the start of the rainy season, and the rain had been particularly bad. The square was practically a pond at this point, and the stairs leading to the docks a waterfall. Thancred had told Erastus he wasn’t to go outside with all the rain, in equal parts due to the risk of him getting lost in the gloomy weather and due to the fact that he didn’t like baths when he was in a good mood, and Thancred didn’t want to be the one to deal with that mess. Much easier to just keep him inside.

His ears flicked down and his face scrunched up as lightning struck somewhere far off, the thunder following soon after. Once the noise died down, Thancred caught sight of his tail wagging as he reached up for the latch on the windows. He still had yet to grow a longer tail, and Lucy said it would likely happen when he hit his next growth spurt (“any day now!” as she assured them all), but he was just tall enough to reach things he had no business touching. Thancred sighed, putting his book down to stand up and close the latch after Erastus had poked it off of its hinge. That made three times now, and every time he put the latch back down Erastus would scrunch his nose at him before looking back to the window. 

“When can I go outside?” Erastus didn’t look away from the window, instead getting as close as he could to the glass to try and get a better look through the water streaming down the panes.

“As I said ten minutes ago, when the rain stops.” Thancred sat back down, picking his book back up but only really staring at the pages. It had been a year and a half now since Cartenau, Eorzea was still mostly in ruins, and he’d drawn the short stick for looking after Erastus since Lucy was needed in the black shroud. The boy still didn’t have any of his memories, and he’d even made a friend, even if Y’shtola was explicitly told that Erastus was not allowed outside of Vesper Bay. He was just worried that whatever enabled him to summon a primal wasn’t entirely gone with the rest of his past, and that taking care of him now was setting the scions up for failure later. Urianger assured him that Erastus’s aether was in no way skewed, which ruled out tempering, but there was no way to be sure given the circumstances. 

“When will it stop?” He’d moved away from the window, finally bored of it and looking for something else to do, rooting around in the spare crates and looking for something behind every corner. 

“As I _also_ said ten minutes ago, I don’t know.” It had been a whole morning of back and forth like this, and Thancred was pretty sure ten minutes from now Erastus would be back at the window if the rain hadn’t stopped by then. 

At least, that’s what he’d _prefer_ to happen. Now it was a bit too quiet for his taste, and he couldn’t see ears or tail of the young Miqo’te. It wasn’t until he started to physically look around that he was startled by a loud ‘FTTTTT’ as something buzzed up towards his ear and into his hair. It took a good bit of frantic patting and pulling to finally grab the offending beetle, holding it by one of its legs as it tried to fly back into his hair. From next to him, Erastus looked positively _delighted_ at the sight, beaming with a smile as wide as his face. Thancred sighed, holding the beetle well away from himself as he walked to the window, Erastus close to his heels. 

It wasn’t until he’d already opened the window and tried to shake the damn thing off his finger until he’d realized his mistake. With his arm still outside, he couldn’t close the window fast enough to keep Erastus from hopping up onto the sill and somersaulting outside and into the rain, landing on his rear with a soft ‘oof’ before taking off to jump in the nearest puddle. Thancred sunk his elbows into the sill, finally having shaken the beetle off but at what cost? He held his head in his hands for a moment, dreading what was to come before hopping out the window himself.

**Author's Note:**

> First free day prompt for the ffxivwrite2020 challenge, decided to just use a random word gen and got "indoors" and ran with it.


End file.
